It’s not possible to freeze old people in the beginning of winter, store them outside, almost naked, and then thaw them out in time to help with the spring planting. Is it? Well, in 1939, a Dr. Temple S. Fay of Philadelphia, who had done some experiments freezing human organs, gave a talk in Providence, […]
MANY YEARS AGO, a member of the Grange in Brattleboro, Vermont, told me proudly that from the program of recycling hearing-aid batteries, the Grange had raised about $70 for its scholarship program. “You mean you personally raised seventy dollars for the Brattleboro Grange by recycling hearing-aid batteries?” I asked. “Heavens, no,” he replied. “I mean […]
In this column last February, I recalled my old friend and barber, Bill Austin, telling me a joke I might use in a forthcoming speech I was to make at the local Women’s Club and assuring me that, no, I needn’t worry. It was clean. In fact, he said, it was so clean “you could […]
THERE SEEM TO be certain New England legends that evolve out of no logical sequence of events at all. Merely a little something someone said can catch our imagination, be repeated and perhaps somewhat embellished, and eventually … voila! It takes its place among the New England legends we love. There are dozens of examples […]
IF I WERE TO compile a list of what I consider to be New England’s “bests,” I wouldn’t include many restaurants, resorts, specialty boutiques, museums, country fairs, and the like. Those things change too quickly and, besides, the current September issue of YANKEE Magazine, celebrating its 70th anniversary in grand style, is devoted to that […]
Being a Vermonter carries with it some heavy responsibilities. First of all, he/she must possess a great deal of common sense. Although somewhere around 100,000 adults living in Vermont today never finished high school, ignorance is not a lack of education but rather a lack of common sense. “That Hardwick road sign back there is […]
Here in New England, we don’t much want to talk about things in the area of sex and romance, particularly in mixed company and even when the mixed company is one’s own spouse. We may be noted for calling a spade a spade, but all of us country people over 70 remember that we never, […]
Not long ago, while watching from my office window the fireman putting up lights on the town Christmas tree here in Dublin, New Hampshire, I began wondering if perhaps New England might lay claim to the very first Christmas tree. Well, the first American Christmas tree. (It is well established that the use of the […]
It was eight years after YANKEE Magazine’s “House for Sale” first appeared (in the April 1950 issue) that Robb Sagendorph, my uncle and Yankee Publishing’s founder, assigned me to be responsible for what had by then become a popular monthly feature. My very first appeared in the November 1958 issue and described the Williamsville General […]
The most vivid and wonderful April sign of all the good things to come is the sound of peepers (little frogs), pronounced “peepahs” here in New England. Welcome to the April 2004 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, the Editor-in-Chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, NH. […]
